Breaking The Limit: One Woman'S Motorcycle Journey Through North America Book

A vivid chronicle of discovery based on a solitary motorcycle trip across America.

Breaking the Limit is one woman's account of riding her motorcycle from New Jersey to Alaska and back. Realizing that years of work and travel in other people's countries made her a stranger in her own, and with an invitation to meet her biological father for the first time, Karen Larsen set out on a fifteen-thousand-mile trip with nothing but her motorcycle and the barest of essentials.

Larsen's journey tests the limits of her own endurance, challenges her long-held beliefs and values, and asks what it means to belong to a family. Through the fields of Iowa and the deserts of the Southwest, over the Rockies and across Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, Larsen confronts questions of femininity, family, independence, and personal identity. Her journey speaks to the immense space and overwhelming beauty of North America, as well as to the diversity and vitality of the people she meets along the way. Breaking the Limit invites you to join her as she braces against the wind, trades security for freedom, sacrifices stability for motion, and opens herself up to the vast canopy of a continent.

Karen Larsen does development work for non-profit organizations. She received her master's degree in public administration from Princeton University and lives in New Jersey.

Kathy Balog

This is a deeply personal moment of reckoning with the misconceptions that keep us from functioning at full throttle. Faced with the open road and the unknown, Larsen finds that true connections exist, if one has the courage to look for them.